Pipe Springs was a station of the Deseret Telegraph, extended in 1871 from Rockville to Kanab. While the latter points are in Utah, the wires were strung southward around a mountainous country along the St. George-Kanab road. This would indicate location of the first telegraph line within Arizona, as the first in the south, a military line from Fort Yuma to Maricopa Wells, Phoenix, Prescott and Tucson, was not built till 1873. Arizona's Northernmost Village Fredonia is important especially as the northernmost settlement of Arizona, being only three miles south of the 37th parallel that divides Utah and this State. It lies on the east bank of Kanab Creek, and is the center of a small tract of farming land, apparently ample for the needs of the few settlers, who have their principal support from stock raising. The first settlement was from Kanab in the spring of 1885, by Thomas Frain Dobson, who located his family in a log house two miles below the present Fredonia townsite. The following year the townsite was surveyed and there was occupation by Henry J. Hortt and a number of others. The name was suggested by Erastus Snow, who visited the settlement in its earliest days, naturally coming from the fact that many of the residents were from Utah, seeking freedom from the enforcement of federal laws. Fredonia is in Coconino County, Arizona, with county seat at Flagstaff, 145 miles distant in air line, but across the Grand Canyon. The easiest method of communication with the county seat is by way of Utah and Nevada, a distance of over 1000 miles. Fredonia was described by Miss Sharlot M. Hall, as "the greenest, cleanest, quaintest village of about thirty families, with a nice schoolhouse and a church and a picturesque charm not often found, and this most northerly Arizona town is almost one of the prettiest. The fields of alfalfa and grain lie outside of the town along a level valley and are dotted over with haystacks, showing that crops have been good." Reference is made to the fact that some of the families were descended from the settlers of the Muddy Valley. There had been the usual trouble in the building of irrigating canals and the washing away of headgates by floods that came down Kanab Creek. Miss Hall continued, "I am constantly impressed with the courage and persistence of the Mormon colony; they have good, comfortable houses here that have been built with the hardest labor amidst floods and drought and all sorts of discouragement. It is one of the most beautiful valleys I have seen in Arizona and has a fine climate the year round; but these first settlers deserve a special place in history by the way they have turned the wilderness into good farms and homes." Concerning the highway to Fredonia, Miss Hall observes, "The Mormon colonists who traveled this road certainly had grit when they started, and grit enough more to last the rest of their lives on the road."